Southwest Sierra #109 – Pauline Elizabeth Rohrig

I mentioned meeting Pauline two weeks ago. This week, I’ll elaborate: In the early 2000s, my mother-in-law Irene was in the grips of Alzheimer’s disease. She was finally placed in a convalescent hospital in Grass Valley (Before she became ill, Irene had made me promise that I would not try to take care of her if she could no longer care for herself. It was as if she had a premonition about it and didn’t want to burden me). At the time that we put Irene in the home, I’d been involved with the Underground Gold Miners Museum for only a few years (since 1999). I was excited to learn that Pauline Rohrig was living in the same convalescent hospital. She was delighted when we (David and I) came into her room and introduced ourselves as residents of Alleghany. After that, whenever we visited Irene, we also stopped and said hi to Pauline. When we walked into her room, she would always exclaim: “Alleghany!” Pauline’s mind was fine, but she was completely bedridden. She was a large lady (as in tall and big, but not fat, bigger than Mary Hope, whom I described the same way).

The picture of her that is included in this week’s article was hanging on the wall of her room. After we’d visited her a few times, I asked if I could take the photo, scan it, and bring it back, but she said “no”. She was worried that I might not bring it back. This was before cell phone cameras had advanced. One of my co-workers at the 16 to 1 mine let me take her older laptop (and the mine’s scanner) to Pauline’s room to capture the photo. I scanned the image at high resolution and crashed the laptop! Luckily, the image was captured, and I managed to move it onto a disc (before flash drives). That old laptop, however, was never the same.

Pauline was born in Cumberland (at the North end of Alleghany) on October 11, 1913. She shared that even though her family moved to Nevada City when she was quite young, they regularly visited her Grandparents and other family members in Alleghany. She spent a lot of time here as a kid playing with her many cousins.

When I met Pauline, I was especially interested in learning anything that I could about the Chinese of Alleghany. Little has been written about them, and only a few images remain. She remembered one Chinese gentleman fondly, whose name was Ah Fong Lee. She said that her father was friends with him and often brought him a freshly butchered hog’s head when they came to Alleghany. Ah Fong Lee was a favorite of all the children. He made occasional business trips to San Francisco, where, besides transacting his mining business, he also purchased trinkets and candy for the children of Alleghany. According to Pauline, he kept these trinkets and candy in a large stash at his home. He shared it generously. She remembered small fans, rice candy, handkerchiefs, and firecrackers.

My mother-in-law Irene died the same day as Ray Charles, June 10, 2004. We visited Pauline a couple of times after that, and she died about five months later, on November 29, at the age of 91. She was the last Rohrig to be buried in that grand cemetery plot in Alleghany.

Regarding the “Hope Essays” mentioned last week: if there is interest, my thought was to share one a month. If not, we’ll stick with our normal eclectic fare. Email the author at: raebell44@gmail.com. Corrections and additional information are always welcome.